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5 Things You Should Do To Improve Your Success Rate

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Check out this quick post to see what actions you should take to improve your success rate!

Take Personal Responsibility

Taking personal responsibility is THE number one requirement to achieving personal success.  The saying, “if it’s going to be, it has to be me” is right on point and its application or lack of, will make or break our success.

So what does taking personal responsibility mean?  I’m sure we all believe we take personal responsibility for our lives.  We go to work, pay the bills, get the children to school, arrange our social lives and even indulge in self development through courses at work and books etc, so what could be missing?

Well, we fail in the personal responsibility arena when we are guilty of blaming others and making excuses.  Using either of these tactics will look like defensiveness to others, which in itself is not a particularly endearing characteristic.  But more importantly, by shifting the blame onto others or the circumstances (deemed to be) outside our control, we are removing our ability to grow from the situation, and, if we don’t grow then we will be unable to demonstrate improved performance the next time we find ourselves in a similar situation. [Read more…] about 5 Things You Should Do To Improve Your Success Rate

How to set BIG Goals!

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waterskiDavid J Schwartz, author of The Magic of Thinking Big sets us a challenge in his quote: “Think little goals and expect little achievements.  Think big goals and win big achievements.”

A great idea, but for many of us setting big goals is much easier said than done!

I think part of the problem with cajoling ourselves to make big goals, is our lack of belief in our ability to create a big, planned outcome.  These big ideas and plans are alien to us because they are so far removed from the world we live in right now, consequently it’s a huge mental leap to see ourselves living a completely (albeit desired) different life.  Additionally, for a lot of people, if they don’t know all the steps that are required to get to their ultimate outcome, then they’d rather not start.

So how can we overcome this inertia and actually make big goals, but fool ourselves into thinking that they aren’t as outlandish as they appear?  The trick, as we all know is to take baby steps, but again, this can be problematic if we’re not prepared to look far enough ahead and actually acknowledge that there is a big goal out there, somewhere in the future.  The technique I like to use is to think in stages, starting from “now” and then building on this.  Here’s a simple table of how building the goal iteratively might look, along with an indication of the possible timeframe:

Small Goal (short term) Bigger Goal (medium term) Biggest Goal (long term)
Within the next year Within the next 2 – 5 years Within the next 3 – 10 years

[Read more…] about How to set BIG Goals!

Could we be any happier?

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Could We Be Any Happier?

I recently ran a poll on my facebook page which asked my readers which one out of four categories (health, money, happiness or time) they would like to have or experience more of (feel free to add your vote!).

It was interesting to see that happiness was in third place out of the four categories, with time and health being more popular and money having no votes at all.  Now, given that over 200 people saw the poll, but only 12 people voted, I guess I can’t call it a scientifically proven observation, but for the purposes of putting a blog post together, I find the results quite interesting.

Did the results indicate that happiness isn’t as elusive as we’re led to believe?  In other words, we are happy, after all; or, the flipside interpretation could be telling us that if we had better health and more time, we’d feel happier.  In reality I put the poll up just for fun, and my observations are just that and don’t take into account the context in which the choice was made so it’s difficult to draw any sound conclusions, but let’s just explore the concept of happiness.

So what is happiness and what makes us happy?  Happiness is one of those strange, personal, intangible things that we often don’t notice we’ve experienced until the moment has passed.  It’s often compared to catching butterflies, but actually I think a better description would be catching faeries which (depending on your beliefs) are illusory and intangible and to the best of my knowledge have never been caught.  They reside only in our imagination and maybe that’s where happiness dwells also, forming part of our perceptions of our life experiences?

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Do You Need A Lucky Break?

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ChessThere’s a natural tendency amongst some to assume that when they see someone successful, it’s because they’ve been lucky in some way – they had wealthy parents or they inherited or won a sizeable sum of money.   And, for some people this may be true, but how many times have we heard of children of wealthy parents going off the rails or squandering the family fortune, or people who win millions on the lottery ending up only a few short years later, back where they started?  Considered from this angle, then it doesn’t look quite so lucky!

But as we know, luck isn’t actually luck at all, and as Seneca tells us…

“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity”. 

Consider the recent London Olympics.  How much could lucky-to-have ‘natural talent’ have contributed to the gold medals received by the winning athletes?   Well there’s no doubt that these athletes are talented, but a much larger part of their success was due to the relentless work they put in in the years leading up to the Olympics.

Malcolm Gladwell, author of  Outliers: The Story of Success believes that we need to put in around 10,000 hours of practice in our chosen field to reach the highest levels of success.   That’s a lot of time.  To put this into context, we would need to practice for at least 4 hours a day, seven days a week for eight years to achieve the mastery that Gladwell is referring to!  For most of us that seems completely out of the question, and in reality, without the support of our families, it’s unlikely that we could commit to that level of input at an early age. [Read more…] about Do You Need A Lucky Break?